team and I have invented a software environment enabling
data-driven material modelling of multifunctional skins
with high spatial resolution in manufacturing.
Technical Approach
Our research has introduced a suite of biologically inspired,
informed and engineered digital fabrication tools,
techniques and technologies, culminating in designs that
have a profound connection with a specific ecosystem.
In mathematical terms, our designs involve a domain, a
range and a mapping. The domain is a specific environment
involving fields such as mechanical forces, stress, temperature
or electromagnetism. The range defines the limits between
which force or property variation is possible. And the
mapping is the process the designer employs in the digital
realm, using physical models expressed mathematically, to
mediate or iteratively map between two distinct physical
entities – context and object – until convergence criteria
are achieved. Until my team’s work, designers invariably
encountered a dimensional mismatch between the
‘environment space’ and the ‘object space’. In principle,
this mismatch entailed a loss of information when a higher
dimensional environment is projected or mapped onto a
lower dimensional object. This is true, unless one is able to
assign and express more than a single property or function
to every point on the object manifold. We have created such
frameworks that allow all or most degrees of freedom of
the natural phenomenon to be embodied by the object.
This advancement presents the opportunity to
develop material engineering, computational approaches
and digital fabrication techniques to introduce property
gradients with high spatial resolution and multifunctionality
across scales. Thus, the ideas and principles behind Material
Ecology inspired the need, and generated a scaffold, for
innovation in computational form-generation and digital
fabrication, increasing the dimensionality of the design space.
Predictive Practice
I believe in a balance between dreaming and building, problem
seeking and problem solving, questioning and answering.
This balance can be reached either by working in parallel on
real-world design commissions and speculative designs, or by
fusing them: the speculative and the actual, the real and the
projected. So far, my team and I have been working on the
latter, inventing and developing new design tools, techniques
and technologies that redefine the way we make things, and
seeding them within speculative design contexts.
One example is our work on high-resolution
multimaterial modelling and bitmap printing, which enable
the design and digital fabrication of structures that can vary
their mechanical and optical properties in high spatial and
temporal resolutions (ones that often transcend the scale of
the physical phenomena they are designed to embody).
Another example is the fibre winding technique
enabling variable density silk spinning – a tool with real and
immediate applications in, as well as relevance to, fabric-made
architectural structures and the fashion industry. This tool
was implemented in the Silk Pavilion, a speculative project
that explores the relationship between digital and biological
‘agents’ in design (see page 314). In it, with the help of 6,500
silkworms, we controlled the distribution of biologically spun
silk structurally (using a robotically spun silk template to
guide silk deposition density, organisation, and location) and
environmentally (using a sun-path diagram to dictate the
movement of the silkworms on top of the scaffold structure).
Our glass printer (see page 320) similarly began
as a speculative project that gradually transformed into a
promising technology with significant potential applications
in product, and even architectural, scales. Think ‘Centre
Pompidou without functional or formal partitions’. Instead,
consider a single, continuous transparent building skin that
can integrate multiple functions and can be shaped to tune its
structural and environmental performance. Not unlike the
human skin, which serves at once as both a barrier and a filter.
The prospect of embedding this and other new forms
of design and construction technology into speculative – yet
practical – contexts thrills me. Built work, whether embodied
in a process or in a product, is essential to who we are and
what we make. Our projects necessitate that we invent the
technologies to create them. In that sense, the relationship
between our design ambitions and the technologies that
enable them is ‘non-platonic’. There is an intimate transfer
of content between product and process, artifact and
technology, technique and expression. »Rottlace. Concept renders of
an exoskeletal mask for the
singer-songwriter Björk.
T h e d e s i g n i s i n f o r m e d b y t h e
geometrical and material logics
that underlie the human
musculoskeletal system. The masks
incorporate tunable physical
properties recapitulating,
augmenting or controlling
the facial form and movement
behind them. The masks are bundled,
multi-material structures,
providing formal and structural
integrity, as well as movement.
See page 327
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